This is a leader’s biggest responsibility – but nobody talks about it…

There’s a simple exercise that you’ve just got to try. Not only try in fact; you must make it a ritual.  Every year, or half year even, you should be doing this, recording the results – and, hopefully, the progress. It will tell you more about the strength of your organisation’s strategy (and thus its […]

What should strategy *feel* like?

DON’T THINK. This is the message that the great sci-fi author Ray Bradbury had taped to his typewriter. He believed that his job, when he sat down to write, wasn’t to have an intellectual experience, but a visceral one. To feel. To live, even.  To have the experience of living whilst being sat at the […]

The Cringe Test

One of my favourite things is to come up with new ways of explaining old concepts. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, and I think that’s true – but there are new ways of expressing things, and they can be just as valuable.  After all, every new expression of an old idea makes […]

The secret process of expert thinkers

I’m going to level with you. It’s about how I work. And I’ll admit up front, it makes me look kinda lazy and unprofessional. But through this essay I hope to show that not only is there logic in the laziness – but that it’s actually the only way to do effective intellectual and creative work. First, […]

How to make strategy stick

The other day I stumbled across this Kevin Kelly quote which really sums up something I’ve learned in the past couple of years: “To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.” In some fields this […]

The correct use of a “why” within strategy

The following is an excerpt from a book I’m working on, called: No Bullshit Strategy: A founder’s guide to forming a strategy that actually works I hope to have it published by the end of this year, and obviously will promote it on here shamelessly, so hopefully it will be of interest to some of […]

5 tips on executing strategy

You’ve heard me say it before, and you’ll hear me say it again: A strategy is only as good as the action it provokes. It’s not an intellectual discipline, it’s a practical one.  Aggressive, confident, coordinated implementation – that’s the actual product here.  Indeed I sometimes think that rather than talking about “strategy” as this […]

Here’s how to get your organisation to commit to strategy

If any of you have read my free little ebook Make Companies Without Competitors, or seen my “Love your competitors” talk, you’ll know that central to my philosophy is the idea of non-competition. Contrary to the common metaphor of the market being “battle ground” or “playing field”, where there is implicitly an enemy to be […]

The 3 ways to judge a strategy

There are two ways a strategy can fail: By being wrong By not being a strategy The first of these, I’m sorry to say, you can’t do much about.  No matter how dazzling your thinking or penetrative your insights, you’ll never really know if it’s going to be effective until after the strategy’s been executed.  […]

The how cascade – where goals end and strategy begins

Of all the strategic sins one could commit, there are few more heinous than the confusion of “goals” with “strategy”. Fortunately it’s so bad that it’s become something of a cliché.  You don’t need to know an awful lot about the field to recognise that “becoming number 1”, or “doubling our revenue”, or “pursuing excellence”, […]